Page:The coronation of Edward the Seventh - a chapter of European and imperial history.djvu/17

, was voted the freedom of the City of London, while within the House of Commons he was supported by members as respectable as Wilberforce, at the height of his renown, and Althorp, at the beginning of his career. Three years later, at the trial of Leigh Hunt for libelling the Prince Regent, Brougham defended the accused with such sympathetic warmth that Chief Justice Ellenborough, in summing up, declared that the eminent advocate "had inoculated himself with all the poison and mischief which the libel was calculated to effect."

The consequence of this combination of influences, the doctrine first imported from France, the public distress and the feeling inspired by some of the royal princes was that when the war was ended, near the close of the long reign of George III., a contemporary historian, reviewing the situation, avowed with regret that in all ranks of society there was "scarcely a company in which certain illustrious personages were mentioned without their names being degraded by some disrespectful or reproachful epithet, the loyalty of the most loyal having become a very cool and calculating sentiment." Impartial observers began, with fear, to wonder whether the ancient monarchy of England, which had been renewed at the last English Revolution without a symptom of republicanism manifesting itself in the land, might not go the way of the old regime in France.

These fears were rendered acute by the death of the